Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd Page B

one, Ann?” Mom says, pointing at the two replicas.
    “I like them both.”
    “Good idea,” she says, and turns to the clerk. “I’ll take both of them.”
    I do not know how to have both things I want. To see him and to stay safely disengaged in my hotel room. I want to know how a person can be happy and isolate herself from most everyone on the planet.
    Maybe I hesitate because I don’t want to be reminded of who I was when I was with him—I’m so far from that person now.
    On the way back to the hotel, we watch the changing of the guard at Parliament House from across the street.
    “It’s been a long day,” Mom says. “Let’s eat dinner in the room.”
    “Okay.”
    “Oh, wait, I forgot. You’re meeting Demetri tonight.”
    “I can still eat with you,” I tell her, but I know what I’m doing. I’m steeping myself in an alternate plan. An escape plan. One about a picnic in the room.
    At a small grocery, we buy cheese pie, a spinach calzone, two bottles of Coke, and a chocolate pastry. When we get to the room, I fall across the bed with my feet dangling off the side. All I can think about is the phone.
    It rings while I’m washing my face at the sink.
    Mom calls into the bathroom, “That must be Demetri. Do you want me to get it?”
    The depression comes, one black wave after another. I look at myself in the mirror. “Let it ring,” I say.
    I close the bathroom door. He will not understand. He will think he means nothing to me.
    I sit on the side of the tub and wait for the phone to stop ringing. When he finally hangs up, I sob into the washcloth.
    Right now, I wish I were someone else. I will have to come out of the bathroom and explain to Mom why I didn’t answer Demetri’s call. I have no idea what I’ll tell her. I want to go out there and sit beside her on the bed and quietly lay my head in her lap. That’s all. I’m twenty-two and that is what I want.
    I open the door. I tell myself not to think about anything except the three words I wrote down on the scroll of paper I left in the cave: I will return .

Sue

    Mary’s House-Ephesus, Turkey
    In the Turkish bazaar at Kuşadasi, Ann and I meander through a bright maze of rugs, evil-eye bracelets, coffee grinders, hookahs, silver jewelry, leather purses, and old pots. To see her now, you would not know she’s depressed. I watch her photograph trays of golden and magenta spices—sumak, kekik, kimyon—and marvel at how her melancholy comes and goes. Back in Athens, her sobs landed like soft, muffled explosions against the closed door of the hotel bathroom, while I sat on the bed feeling their detonations inside my chest, and now she circles objects with her camera, engrossed in pleasure, cracking up at the dark-eyed toddler who pretends to smoke a hookah and his mother who puts on a show of scolding him but keeps lapsing into laughter.
    We left Athens two days ago, desperate for air temperature less than ninety-nine degrees. Boarding a ship at Piraeus for an excursion to several Greek islands and the coast of Turkey, we sailed into the cool blue colors of the Aegean, clinging to the rail of the deck like wind socks, filling up with fat, glorious breezes. Yesterday, as we hiked around Mykonos, the island was brimming with wind-mills and zephyrs, and when the sun slumped toward the horizon, we floated back to the ship in small boats, shivering in the tinted light.
    “Oh great, now we need sweaters !” I told Ann.
    I behave as if she’s fine, as if I did not hear her grief spilled out in the bathroom, but I no longer doubt her depression. When I wake—at all hours of the night—that is what first breaks the surface of my thoughts. Then the sinkhole of fear opens. I know I should talk to her, intervene, do something . . . but it’s so easy to go on acting as we are, giggling at goose bumps on our arms.
    A particular memory has come to me twice since we boarded the ship. I am a new mother for the first time, barely twenty-four years old, and